“Brightness Falls from the Air” by Margaret St. Clair was first published in the April 1951 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as “?” F&SF ran it as a name-the-story contest. You can read it online here.
If I had been a reader in 1951, I would have submitted “The Plague.” If I had precognition, I would have submitted “The Ugly Terrans,” inspired by the 1958 bestseller, The Ugly American.
“Brightness Falls from the Air” shows writing development for Margaret St. Clair over her “The Listening Child,” published a year earlier. This story has bite. Humans occupy an alien planet where they treat the local intelligent life like the Romans treated conquered people. St. Clair instills this comparison in the first sentence, telling us her protagonist, Kerr, is in the tepidarium. Tepidarium was the name of a warm room positioned between the frigidarium and caldarium in Roman baths.
Kerr meets Rhysha, a bird person, and befriends her when she comes to claim the body of her brother, who died in a gladiatorial battle held by the humans. Throughout this short story, we learn humans have never curbed their population growth and have spread across the galaxy like a pandemic. We are not nice. Kerr tries to give Rhysha hope by telling her humans will one day change. Reading this story 73 years later, we know that’s unlikely.
I liked “Brightness Falls from the Air” so much more than “The Listening Child” (Group Read 92 #01 of 25) because it’s so dark. F&SF began as a light fantasy magazine, but as it included more science fiction, the overall tone of the magazine became heavier and darker. We’d entered the Cold War. Thoughts of nuclear annihilation become rampant.
Worrying about overpopulation in 1951, put Margaret St. Clair ahead of most other science fiction writers. Overpopulation wasn’t a major theme in SF until the 1960s – or so I thought until I read Joachim Boaz’s “Science Fiction Novels/Short Stories about Overpopulation.” Her story would be tied with “The Marching Morons” by C. M. Kornbluth as first since it was also published in April 1951, in Galaxy Magazine. Is it coincidence that both stories claim Homo sapiens are losers?
“Brightness Falls from the Air” could also fit into Boaz’s series concerning science fiction critical of space exploration. (I wish Joachim would put this series on the menu like his series on overpopulation, generation ships, and immortality.)
Even though I liked “Brightness Falls from the Air” much more than “The Listening Child,” they both have the same simple plot: a nice person sympathizes and befriends a tragic person who dies. In both stories, characterization is minimal. Each character is described by their relationship to the plot. None of these characters has their own agenda.
I admire “Brightness Falls from the Air” because it’s a vicious attack on humanity and says we shouldn’t colonize the galaxy. This feels even more valid in 2025. Yet, that’s not enough to make it a great story. It was included in David Hartwell’s The Science Fiction Century, so it’s better remembered than “The Listening Child.” However, it doesn’t have the lasting impact of “The Marching Morons.” It’s too slight.
“Brightness Falls from the Air” is a nice little story, but it’s not good enough to be great.
“The Listening Child” was first published in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (December 1950) by Margaret St. Clair using the pseudonym Idris Seabright. You can read it online here. It is short story #1 of 25 that our Facebook group will be discussing as Group Read 92. (See the reading schedule at the end of this review.) Group Read 92 consists of 25 stories picked by five group members that we haven’t read before. That was a challenge since we’ve been discussing a short story daily for years. The group is public.
In the 1950s, extrasensory perception (ESP) was a popular theme in science fiction and fantasy magazines. It was often speculated that people with physical or mental abnormalities might have additional senses to compensate for the loss of one of their primary senses. I assume the assumption came from blind people who had keener hearing.
After Hiroshima, science fiction and comic book writers often used radiation as a cause of ESP. However, in the 1930s and 1940s, John W. Campbell was impressed by the Rhine experiments, and science fiction writers often supposed that advanced aliens had psychic powers. Arthur C. Clarke, who was normally a hard SF writer, proposed that the evolution of human development led to ESP in two of his most famous novels, Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Soft science and fantasy writers leaned towards psi-powers in physically and mentally damaged humans, like Theodore Sturgeon’s More Than Human.
Margaret St. Clair imagines a deaf mute having a rather unique ESP talent. Timmy can “hear” when death is near. Many famous stories personify death, so this isn’t too out there, but it’s not as believable as other ESP talents, even though it is well proven that ESP does not exist. Still, hearing death makes for a nice story idea.
St. Clair’s setup for her story is rather quaint. Edwin Hoppler is 63 and suffers from a weak heart. He lives in a boarding house. Boarding houses have disappeared, but were common in old movies and science fiction short stories before the 1960s. Quite a few episodes of The Twilight Zone were set in boarding houses. It’s a shame they don’t still exist. Living with several other individuals who ate communal meals fixed by a nice old lady sounds pleasant.
Timmy is the landlady’s grandson, and Edwin feels sorry for him. Edwin befriends Timmy when he realizes that the other kids don’t play with Timmy. Edwin notices that Timmy “listens” intently at times, and eventually notices that these listening moments precede a person or animal dying. Edwin decides to use Timmy as the canary in a coal mine to detect his own impending heart episodes.
“The Listening Child” is a pleasant little story, but rather slight. Timmy and Edwin are only developed enough as characters to present the idea for the story. There’s little conflict or tension. The story also lacks color or voice. The idea is slight, but writers can flesh out simple ideas into complex characterization and plots. For example, compare it to “Jeffty is Five” by Harlan Ellison. Jeffty is a boy who is perpetually five, and always lives in the year he was five, with the popular culture never changing. Or read “Baby is Three” by Theodore Sturgeon; it’s tremendously dramatic for a boy with psychic powers talking to a psychiatrist.
I don’t want to tell you the ending, but I expected St. Clair thought her readers would find it emotional and poignant. It was presented too casually for me to be moved, but I’m curious if other members from our short story reading group will be moved. I wanted the ending to be like in Platoon when we see Elias still alive, and the emotional impact we felt watching him die.
I’m working on a project to find my all-time favorite science fiction stories I’ve read over the past sixty years. Identifying such stories means learning what makes a story work. Most published stories succeed at a basic three-star level, which is how I’d rate “The Listening Child.”
For this story to reach the four-star level, Timmy and Edwin would need to become vivid characters. To make it to a five-star story would require elevating the story gimmick of hearing death into something metaphorical and philosophical that I would want to contemplate over several readings.
James Wallace Harris, 4/21/25
Group Read 92 Schedule
01 (04/22/25) – The Listening Child, by Margaret St. Clair (ss) F&SF, December 1950 (DH)
02 (04/24/25) – Brightness Falls from the Air, by Margaret St. Clair (ss) F&SF, April 1951 (FP)
03 (04/26/25) – The Rose, by Charles L. Harness (na), Authentic Science Fiction, 15 March 1953 (PF)
04 (04/29/25) – The Last Day, by Richard Matheson (ss), Amazing, April/May 1953 (FP)
05 (05/01/25) – Watershed, by James Blish (ss), If, May 1955 (RH)
06 (05/03/25) – The Certificate, by Avram Davidson (ss), F&SF, March 1959 (FP)
07 (05/06/25) – To See the Invisible Man, by Robert Silverberg (ss), Worlds of Tomorrow, April 1963 (FP)
08 (05/08/25) – A Two-Timer, by David I. Masson (nv), New Worlds 159, February 1966 (PF)
09 (05/10/25) – The Adventuress, by Joanna Russ (nv), Orbit 2, ed. Damon Knight (Putnam, 1967) (RH)
10 (05/13/25) – No War, or Battle’s Sound, by Harry Harrison (nv), If, October 1968 (FP)
11 (05/15/25) – The Milk of Paradise, by James Tiptree, Jr. (ss), Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. Harlan Ellison (Doubleday, 1972) (RH)
12 (05/17/25) – Pale Roses, by Michael Moorcock (nv), New Worlds 7, ed. Hilary Bailey & Charles Platt (Sphere, 1974) (PF)
13 (05/20/25) – Concepts, by Thomas M. Disch (nv), F&SF, December 1978 (PF)
14 (05/22/25) – Gate of Faces, by Ray Aldridge (nv), F&SF, April 1991 (PF)
15 (05/24/25) – On Sequoia Time, by Daniel Keys Moran (ss), Asimov’s, September 1996 (PN)
16 (05/27/25) – Journey into the Kingdom, by M. Rickert (nv), F&SF, May 2006 (PN)
17 (05/29/25) – Roxie, by Robert Reed (ss), Asimov’s, July 2007 (PN)
18 (05/31/25) – 26 Monkeys, Also the Abyss, by Kij Johnson (ss), Asimov’s, July 2008 (DH)
19 (06/03/25) – Passage of Earth, by Michael Swanwick (ss), Clarkesworld 91, April 2014 (PN)
20 (06/05/25) – Cimmeria, by Theodora Goss (ss), Lightspeed 50, July 2014 (RH)
I’ve decided to assemble an anthology of my favorite science fiction short stories. I’m not going to publish it. This book will be just for me to read. Before personal computers I would have created such an anthology by xeroxing all my favorite stories and putting them into a big folder, binder, or box. Now, with computers I can create a digital file that I can read with my iPad. I’ve discovered I can convert digital magazines, e-book pages, web pages, or even scan physical books to .pdf files that are easy to read on my iPad.
This project is only practical if you’re savvy with computers.
You can read .pdf files with almost any device, but for fiction reading, it’s best to read on a tablet. My method doesn’t work well with Kindles, other e-ink readers, or smartphones because the .pdf files are a collection of .jpg images. This system works great with both iOS and Android tablets.
The next step for this project to be practical is to have a convenient way to load files onto your tablet. I save .pdf versions of stories to a folder on Dropbox and read them with the Dropbox application on my tablets. Dropbox has a built-in reader for common file formats like .pdf files.
I create the .pdf files using Abbyy Finereader 15, but you can use any program that will convert a collection of images to a .pdf file. The free PDFgear works great on Windows. However, the Mac version doesn’t allow for no margins and centers all images on a white background. That works but annoys me.
There are other cloud storage providers that work with tablets if you don’t use Dropbox. Dropbox has a free basic account with 2GB’s of space that will hold hundreds of stories. If you’re a tablet user, you probably already know which cloud drive works well with it.
If you have these technical solutions solved, the next step is to find stories to read on your computer. They can be from an ebook, web pages, or a page you scan yourself. If you look around, many old science fiction magazines have been digitized in the CBR/CBZ format. I use a CBR reader call YACreader. YACreader allows me to right-click on any page and save it to a .jpg. I name each page by the title of the story – author – page number of the original publication.
You can also use your screenshot utility to capture what you see on screen from a web page, ebook, or any program that displays stories to save as a .jpg file. I put all the .jpg pages in a folder that I name after the story. Here’s my folder for “Deadly City” by Paul W. Fairman from the March 1953 issue of If Magazine.
I then launch Abbyy Finereader (or PDFgear) and tell it to covert those pages to .pdf. I save the resulted file to a folder called “My Favorite SF Short Stories” and name the file by the title and author. Here are my first 27 stories. I just convert stories as I reread them and determine they are a favorite. Here’s my current folder on Windows:
Here’s what my directory of favorite stories looks like in Dropbox on my iPad mini. The directory is on the left, and the preview is on the right. It’s very nice.
And here’s what the story looks like in the reader view of Dropbox:
As you can see, I’ve copied the story from a scan of the original magazine. You can find scans of old magazines all over the web, such as archive.org. However, sellers on eBay and Facebook are now selling complete collections of digitized old magazines fairly cheap. I bought DVDs years ago with complete runs of my favorite SF magazines.
I do own several hundred of hardback, paperback, ebook, and audiobook science fiction anthologies. I also own several hundred physical issues of science fiction magazines from the 20th century. And I can call up nearly every issue of any science fiction magazine published in the 20th century on my iPad. So, why would I want to take the trouble to make my own anthology of favorite SF stories?
I’ve read thousands of science fiction short stories over the last sixty-three years. Some I’ve read several times. Since I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered that there’s a depth to fiction that’s only revealed through rereading and study. I’m working to get beyond just reading and pursue understanding. Creating this anthology is my way of narrowing down the list of stories I want to study. I will add and delete to “My Favorite SF Stories” folder for the rest of my life. It’s becoming a project.
I’m focusing on the science fiction short story because I’ve always believed the science fiction magazine was the true heart of science fiction. And besides, novels are too long.
Think of fiction as a symbolic message from another person. How often in day-to-day interaction with your friends would you let one of them talk to you for hours without stopping? Usually, it’s no more than a few seconds. If your friend went on for minutes, you’d get annoyed. But we listen to what the author of fiction says for hours on end because they tell entertaining stories.
When you read a story one time it feels like you got the message and you’re done. But if you reread that story, you’ll often discover that you missed many parts of the message. Sometimes the author is saying something that requires reading the story several times before it’s understandable. You’ll discover there was a lot more to the story than you imagined. Great fiction has great depths to explore. Authors of great fiction often have many things to say but don’t say it directly. Words have severe limitations, so writers must communicate with imagery, symbolism, poetry, psychology, philosophy, and in ways that have no label.
I had a friend who died a long time ago, his name was Williamson. Before Williamson died, he started rejecting everything he loved in life until he had only two interests that kept his interest. I didn’t talk to him just before he died, but I’ve always wondered if he chose his final favorite before leaving this existence.
I’ve notice this process in others who have died. Now that I’m getting old, I understand that process. Our psychic energy dwindles away, and we can’t hang onto everything we once loved, so we start triaging out passions. I call this The Williamson Effect.
I’m in the process of identifying the science fiction stories I still care about and want to remember. My ability to remember is fading. I forget new fiction as fast as I consume it, but some older fiction has lasting power. Like Williamson, I realize I’m letting things go to focus on what I loved best. However, I’m not down to two things yet. I can still hold onto to about a hundred stories. I know the number of stories in my anthology will dwindle over time as I let some stories go.
I have several goals in mind for assembling this anthology:
To decide on my all-time favorite science fiction short stories
To reread short remembered stories to see if they still hold up
To read recommended stories I haven’t read
To collect stories I will regularly reread and study
To collect stories that exhibit the best qualities of science fiction
To collect stories that convey a sense of genre history and evolution
To collect stories that were the most groundbreaking
To collect stories that cover all the essential themes
Hopefully find audio editions of all these stories
To collect stories to psychoanalyze as to why I liked them
To collect stories I feel had special messages in them by the authors
Currently, I’m contemplating how to organize this anthology. My first inclination is by date, like The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One. It also occurs to me I should organize the stories by science fictional themes. Groff Conklin did that in The Best of Science Fiction.
Then, I’ve also had some ambitious ideas. Could I find a program where I could write a memoir of reading science fiction and provide links to all the stories where I could read the full text? Could a wiki or Obsidian handle that? What about feeding all my memories and texts into an AI? I once fed Google’s Notebook LM “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany and it produced a podcast of two people talking insightfully about the story. That was damn neat.
One reason I’m inventing this project is because my memory is becoming unreliable. I’m hoping that working on the project will stenghten my mind. But I’m also running out of energy, so I need to keep things simple enough to get things done. Putting all my favorite stories in one anthology will be the easiest and quickest solution. Right now I remember too many favorite stories. I’ll need to create multiple volumes of this anthology at first, probably by decade.
Ultimately, my anthology of favorite stories will start to shrink as I distill the table of contents to my absolute favorites. I’m hoping, even assuming, that I will discover new insights about myself and my life-long addiction to fiction.
I’ve been rereading Ray Bradbury short stories, and I’m amazed at how well they hold up even when the science is beyond dated. Ray Bradbury is quite cruel to us readers in “All Summer in a Day.” In fact, I had to stop reading when I knew where the story was going, I just didn’t want to go there. I waited a couple of days to finish this fifteen-minute story on audio.
At first the kids in “All Summer in a Day” reminded me of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts characters, but then it was obvious they associated with bad kids from stories by Charles Beaumont or Shirley Jackson.
Remember when Lou Grant told Mary Richards she had spunk? And then Lou said, “I hate spunk.” Well, “All Summer in a Day” has a punch in the gut, and I should say “I hate a punch in the gut,” but when it comes to short stories, a punch in the gut is a good thing. Isn’t that weird. Why do we admire a great punch in the gut from a short story? Why is it so satisfying?
“All Summer in a Day” is set on Venus where it rains continuously except for a two-hour window of clear weather and sunshine every seven years. In a classroom the kids are talking about the impending summer. One girl, Margot, was born on Earth and didn’t come to Venus until she was four. She could remember sunshine and tried to describe it to her classmates who didn’t remember the sun because they were born on Venus. They were just two the previous summer day. They didn’t believe Margot. They resented that she knew something special. So, just before the sun was to come out, they locked Margot in a closet. All the other kids got to see the sun, and it was everything and more that Margot had tried to describe to them.
The children completely forgot about Margot while they cavorted through their brief summer day. When the rain and clouds returned, they remembered Margot and let her out.
This is a simple story about how children are cruel to each other. It’s about being the nail that sticks up. It’s about knowing the undescribable. Does the setting on Venus really matter? It makes the story science fiction so Ray Bradbury can sell it to a science fiction magazine, but does it really matter to the story? Charles Schultz could have done such a story about how the Peanuts gang mistreated Charlie Brown, and may have many times, I just can’t cite a specific panel.
I’m in the process of rereading my favorite science fiction stories and trying to understand why they are my favorites. Writing ability accounts for some of the reasons, but triggered emotions count for many too. I wish I could say I understood every cog in this story, but I don’t. What I do recognize is Ray Bradbury has a set of skills to tell a story in a way that makes it stand out. Not only that, but his stories also endure.
As I reread this story I didn’t remember the details, but either I guessed or remembered what was going to happen to Margot. That’s why I stopped listening to it. But when I returned to the story, I kept thinking to myself: “How is Margot going to react?” I was surprised that Bradbury didn’t give us Margot’s reaction. He left that up to us. That’s another tool in his writing toolbox. Writers don’t have to tell us everything. Bradbury does tell us this about Margot:
Because I just finished reading a biography of Ray Bradbury I know he was an odd child that stood out to his classmates. He also like to write poetry. Bradbury doesn’t have to tell us that this story is for us loners and oddballs, the ones other kids considered weird. When I was growing up, I didn’t know anyone else who read science fiction. Science fiction was like the sun appearing on Venus to me. I tried to explain its appeal to other kids, but they just thought I was a zero. I didn’t make a science fiction reading friend until the tenth grade when I met James Joseph Andrew Connell, III. The experience of meeting another science fiction fan is why Among Others by Jo Walton won the Hugo, Nebula, and British Fantasy Award. Zenna Henderson made a whole writing career out of telling stories about oddballs.
Even in the 1940s Ray Bradbury knew that being labeled a science fiction writer would hurt his career. Bradbury authored stories for all kinds of markets and genres, but when he wrote science fiction, he knew he had to be different. Back in the 1950s he might have been the best-known science fiction writer in America, but many science fiction readers didn’t consider his work science fiction. Bradbury wanted to be a writer like Sherwood Anderson, Ernest Hemingway, or Thomas Wolfe, someone who was just called a writer.
The reason “All Summer in a Day” is good is because of the parts that aren’t science fiction. The reasons why some science fiction fans dismissed him was for the science fiction parts. The obvious lesson here for would-be science fiction writers, is don’t worry about the science fictional aspects but focus on the universal human appeal.
My friend Mike recently told me an anecdote from Here Comes Civilization: The Complete Science Fiction of William Tenn Volume 2. It was in the afterward to the story “The Human Angle.” It seems Ted Sturgeon invited William Tenn over for dinner with a hidden agenda. When Tennn arrived, Sturgeon told him that Mary Gnaedinger, the editor of Famous Fantastic Mysteries needed three short stories by tomorrow and they would write two of them that night. Ray Bradbury was going to write the third and air mail it special delivery to Mary from California. (See the “Afterward” below for the full tale.)
Tenn, Sturgeon, and Bradbury did come through in twenty-four hours and their stories were printed in the October 1948 issue of Famous Fantastic Mysteries. You can read that issue at Archive.org.
There were many legendary science fiction writers (and pulp writers) who bragged they could crank out a short story in a day, or a novel in a weekend. But is this hack writing any good? That’s hard to say. What is good? All three stories, “The Women,” “The Human Angle,” and “That Low” were readable stories and even entertaining. However, they are also quite forgettable. But not completely forgettable. Follow the links to view their reprint histories.
Men and women who wanted to make a living writing science fiction back in the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s had to produce a lot of content. Many science fiction writers made a half-ass living churning out short stories for magazines. But are these speedy productions worth your time to read today? That depends.
Short stories can achieve several levels of quality and recognition. Getting published in a magazine is the first rung up in a ladder of publishing success. The next step up in recognition of quality is being nominated for an award or getting reprinted in an anthology, especially an annual best-of-the-year anthology. Winning an award is another step up. After that, recognition comes slowly. Having an author include a story in one of their short story collections at least says the author is proud of that story. But having a story reprinted in a retrospective or theme anthology means the story stands out over the other stories that came out in the year it was first published. Even greater recognition is when a short story is used in a textbook and taught in school or optioned for a film or television show.
The Bradbury and Tenn were anthologized in a few minor theme anthologies as well as a few author collections. Bradbury included “The Women” in his famous I Sing the Body Electric collection. Tenn used “The Human Angle” for the title of a collection. Sturgeon’s story was reprinted in Mary Kornbluth’s Science Fiction Showcase, which was a special anthology probaby to help the widow of C. M. Kornbluth. “That Low” was only reprinted in Sturgeon’s complete stories series, suggesting that Sturgeon never liked it much. They were not major stories. However, these stories were sold several times, and they are in print today.
But back to my title question: How to judge hack writing. First, we must consider what kind of reader you are. Are you an indiscriminate reader, like someone who comes home from work and turns on the television and quickly finds something to watch by flipping through the channels? Or, are you the kind of person who Googles to find the critically admired shows that just came out this month? Maybe, you’re the person who looks at lists of the best TV series of all-time hoping to find something amazing to watch.
The Bradbury, Tenn, and Sturgeon stories are perfectly good stories if you’re capable of being entertained by an average episode of an average TV series. And that might be good enough for most people. But if you’re the kind of person who thinks in terms of the “Ten Best Episodes of The Twilight Zone,” these stories don’t even come close. And, if you compare them to “Fondly Fahrenheit” by Alfred Bester, or “The Story of Your Life” by Ted Chiang, or “The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas” by Ursula K. Le Guin, then they aren’t even in the same galaxy.
I’ve developed a rating system I sometimes use in group discussions about short stories. One star is an amateur effort, and two stars is a story that still needs work and shouldn’t have been published. I seldom even mention these stories. Three stars to me is a professional story acceptable for magazine publishing. Four stars is a story that is good enough for me to look forward to rereading. Five stars is a story I’ve read many times and consider a classic.
Hack writers can routinely crank out three-star stories. The stories by Bradbury, Tenn, and Sturgeon are all three-star stories. I didn’t mind reading them, but at my age, they are a waste of my precious reading time – a commodity that’s dwindling. They were fun to look up and read because of Tenn’s anecdote about how and why they got written, but that’s about all.
When I’m restless, I still enjoy reading old science fiction anthologies. I have trouble watching TV, but I can still read for fun. I enjoy looking for gems. The trouble is I seldom find stories like “The Star Pit” by Samuel R. Delany or “Flowers for Algernon” by Daniel Keyes. But that’s what I’m really hoping to find, stories that work at that level.
I also want to know why and how stories work at the highest level of short story writing. I assume there must be definable qualities I can list, but I can’t list those qualities now. I plan to study my favorite 5-star stories and make a list in the future.
I will say the Bradbury story had the most writing qualities of the three stories. It had the most emotional tension. It had the most vivid details. It had the most poetic imagery. I cared for the wife in the black bathing suit. And it was the least predictable of the three stories.
The Tenn story was a vampire story. It has an unusual setting for a vampire story, which was a plus, and it had a different kind of vampire, another plus. But it was the most predictable of the three stories, and the least developed. Bradbury just had way more tension and conflict in his story. Sturgeon’s ending was the most surprising, but it wasn’t a very insightful surprise.
The obvious thing I can say about hack writing is it needs more drafts. Many hack stories could have been far better if they had baked longer in the oven. Writers who are proud of their first-draft writing might regularly sell their work, but it will never be considered great. A good example is Barry Malzberg. Some of his stories and novels are quite appealing, but none of them are books I want to reread. The absolute measure of great fiction is how often readers reread such work.
Robert Silverberg at the beginning of his career cranked out science fiction. Some of it was readable, but neither memorable nor something I’d want to reread. Then at the end of the sixties he changed. I assume he spent more time rewriting, although in some of those same years he cranked out four novels. But Downward to the Earth was different. I’ve read it twice and look forward to rereading it again.
I’m currently reading book 20 of The Great SF Stories 1-26 (1939-1964) edited by Isaac Asimov and Martin H. Greenberg with Robert Silverberg doing #26 with Greenberg after Asimov died. I’ve been reading them in order, along with the other best of the year anthologies that covered the same year. For any given year, I’d say there were less than five stories that I’d rate 5-stars. On average I’d say it’s two 5-star stories in each year. Most of the other stories are 3-stars and 4-stars.
I’m not sure if there are even three hundred 5-star stories in all the years of science fiction. Most would-be science fiction writers who achieve some success publish a handful of stories before starting on novels. I’m not sure if hack writers still exist. There are bestselling writers who crank out one or two novels a year who might be considered hack writers because of their productivity, but I don’t know if they are hack writers like Philip K. Dick, Ray Bradbury, Clifford Simak, Harlan Ellison, Robert Silverberg, and Theordore Sturgeon were early in their career when they could publish a dozen short stories and a couple of novels in a year. Ray Bradbury was quite proud of selling one short story a week pace, and he published in both the pulps and slicks.
Just because a story was written fast, doesn’t mean it’s bad. But the odds of it being great are low. I’m in a handful of online groups whose members love short fiction. There are many readers out there who appreciate good hack writing, especially those old readers who love pulp fiction. I don’t want to criticize such stories and their fans. I have often enjoyed a fun average story, but I’ve forgotten thousands of them.
Did science fiction brainwash us into wanting to go to space? I can remember being a little kid in the 1950s and thinking the most exciting thing I could do in life was to go Mars. Before that I wanted to be a cowboy. If you’re old enough to remember television in the 1950s, most of the shows were westerns. That’s why most little boys back then had Santa bring them a six-gun and cowboy outfit for Christmas. But then we discovered science fiction and Project Mercury, and we traded in our cowboy hat for a space helmet.
My most common daydreams in adolescence after the XXX kind, were about going to Mars. Fantasies about becoming a rockstar came in a distant third. Looking back, I realize how unrealistic my teenage hopes for the future were. I was completely clueless as to what girls wanted, couldn’t carry a tune, and I most definitely didn’t have the right stuff. At seventy-three I see the absurdity of my childhood fantasies, so why didn’t I see them then?
Ray Bradbury is often accused of not being a true science fiction writer. Even as he started selling short stories to science fiction magazines in the 1940s, he knew he didn’t want to be labeled a science fiction writer. Yet, somehow, his very unscientific science fiction from back then has the heart and soul of science fiction, especially his stories collected in The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man.
“The Rocket Man” first appeared in The Illustrated Man and Maclean’s in early 1951. It’s about a 14-year-old boy who cherishes the few days his father is home from space. The father is always going off for three-month tours of duty as a rocket man. He tells the boy and his mother that when he’s in space he can’t wait to get home, but when he’s home, he can’t wait to get back to space. “The Rocket Man” deglamarizes space travel. In fact, the dad eventually asks his son to promise to never go into space.
The main reason Bradbury’s science fiction stories are great is because he sees both the fantasy and reality of science fiction. Bradbury is obviously obsessed with remembering childhood, but somehow, he was wise when young too.
By the way, the essence of the story is captured wonderfully in Elton John’s song “Rocket Man.” My favorite version of that song is this bluegrass cover:
But the question I want to explore is why did we all want to go into space? What’s so hot about outer space, the Moon, Mars, etc.? Why did we buy into those dreams that science fiction was selling?
My fantasy was always Mars. But Mars is only a planet that a geologist could love. There ain’t nothing there but rocks and cold. Why did reading The Red Planet by Robert A. Heinlein make me think the best place in existence was Mars? Why does rereading The Martian Chronicles elicit so much intense nostalgia? And why do I think “A Rose for Ecclesiastes” is the epitomy of Martian fantasies?
Over the decades I’ve come to realize that the fantasies we embrace as young children are ones we seldom give up. That’s why kids who embrace religion when little seldom give up God and Heaven no matter how convincing science and logic are at invaliding their faith. Some people never let go of their Christian fantasies, and I never gave up science fiction fantasies. We’re all delusional.
Brian Collins at Science Fiction & Fantasy Remembrance seemed depressed in his current post. His solution is to read old science fiction and fantasy. That’s been my solution too when I think about the state of the world and U.S. politics. Even as a kid, I never really believed I would go into space, but thinking about it was a wonderful way to soothe the stresses of growing up. And now reading science fiction is the balm for growing old.
“The Million Year Picnic” by Ray Bradbury is about as famous to science fiction readers as O’Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” is to English majors. “The Million Year Picnic” was first published in the Summer 1946 issue of Planet Stories. (Read it online here.)
However, most readers know “The Million Year Picnic” as “October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic” from The Martian Chronicles. Most modern readers think The Martian Chronicles is so out of date scientifically that they don’t consider it science fiction but fantasy. But it is science fiction, and “The Million Year Picnic” is a classic, touching on several iconic themes of the genre.
“The Million Year Picnic” was published just one year after Hiroshima, making it one of the earliest stories about humanity destroying the Earth with atomic weapons. But we don’t know that right away. When we begin reading the story, Bradbury voices his story with a quaint tone, almost like a parable, sounding like Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood. A father, mother, and their three sons have just landed on Mars. They decide to go fishing. The narrative pacing seems only a few steps up from “See Dick run.”
Back in the 1940s, throughout the 1950s, and even into the 1960s, it was popularly considered that there was life on Mars or had once been, even intelligent life. This is partly due to H. G. Wells and Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer who convinced the world that he saw canals on Mars. Until July 1965 when Mariner 4 showed us a couple dozen grainy pictures of Mars that looked like the Moon, we had so much hope for Mars.
Science fiction writers loved to imagine Mars occupied with all kinds of beings and ancient civilizations. The common belief was Mars was a cold dying cold world and Venus was a hot young jungle world. Ray Bradbury wrote many stories based on these assumptions. In 1950 Bradbury published a collection of his stories about Mars as The Martian Chronicles, a “fix-up” novel. (In 2009, Subterranean Press published The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition, which claimed to collect all of Bradbury’s stories about Mars. I’d love to have a copy, but the cheapest copy I can find online is $1,300.) Because “The Million Year Picnic” was so popular it had already been reprinted three times before The Martian Chronicles. And it has been extensively reprinted ever since.
Bradbury also reprinted “The Million Year Picnic” in his collection: S is for Space. Most of Bradbury’s science fiction was found in four collections when I was growing up: The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, S is for Space, and R is for Rocket. Bradbury quit writing science fiction for the most part in the 1950s and went on to write fantasy, horror, and mainstream fiction after that. I read “The Million Year Picnic” this week because the Facebook group Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Short Fiction is reading 12 science fiction stories by Ray Bradbury that they haven’t read before. Here’s the discussion schedule.
But back to the story. After the family sets out on a boat on a Martian canal to go fishing we slowly learn that “The Million Year Picnic” is a post-apocalyptic tale. But we don’t discover it right away. The three boys are all excited. Timothy, the oldest carefully watches his father, trying to learn what’s happening. As they travel down the canal they pass by countless old cities where Martians once lived. Some cities are just mounds, while others have grand skylines. The dad promises his boys he will show them the Martians, and they get excited.
Along the way, we discover “The Million Year Picnic” follows another hoary old science fiction theme, the retelling of Adam and Eve. This idea had become so overused that by the 1960s writer’s guidelines for magazines would state “no Adam and Eve stories.”
I don’t know how many times I’ve read “The Million Year Picnic.” But back in the early 1960s when I first discovered it, I still believed in Martians on Mars. I was so into Mars, that as a kid, I thought my goal in life was to get there. So when I read the story I focused on the dead Martian civilization. That’s what made the story exciting. I too wanted to see the Martians. And that’s how I always remember this story, especially the surprise ending, which was quite clever.
However, on this rereading, I realized that I had forgotten Bradbury’s serious point. Bradbury was a nostalgic writer, even as a young man. He grew up in the 1920s and 1930s and his stories often have the feel of that era, like watching old black and white Frank Capra movies. Many of his Martian stories transplant small midwestern downs to Mars. But Bradbury wrote “The Million Year Picnic” with an undercurrent of horror and even cynicism. The quaint family on Mars has fled an Earth where humanity has destroyed itself in a nuclear war.
When the Dad realizes the radio signals from Earth have gone silent he tells his boys that one day their grandchildren might hear radio signals again. When I read that I thought about Adam and Eve and their sons and how Biblical skeptics always asked “Where did the wives of Adam and Eve’s sons come from?”
I’m always amused and fascinated by what I remember and don’t remember from stories when I reread them. The gimmick ending of “The Million Year Picnic” overshadows all my memories. I had completely forgotten this was a post-apocalyptic story. In other words, I remembered the positive and forgot the negative. I also forgot how many Biblical allusions where were in the story.
Bradbury solves the wives’ problem. In the end, we learn that another family had also secretly prepared to go to Mars when armageddon began, this one had four daughters.
Now that number is interesting. Bradbury even tells us it will be a problem. I think he’s hinting at the old Cain and Abel conflict. Humans don’t change and even if we start over we’ll have violence and wars again. We know two if not three of the sons will want that extra wife.
The problem is I always go on to read other science fiction. Rereading “The Million Year Picnic” makes me want to delve into Bradbury once again, and read or reread all these books I’ve collected. Even though I’m retired and have all my time free, I can’t seem to find the time to pursue this project. I’m hoping the Facebook group reading of Bradbury will get me going.
If you’re a fan of listening to short stories, I recommend two giant collections of Ray Bradbury on audio that repackages four of Bradbury’s early collections. #1-32 is The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories (1997), and #33-63 is A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories (1998). I wish Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Stories (2003) were on audio, but it is not. (Table courtesy of Piet Nel.)
The first time I read Camp Concentration by Thomas M. Disch, I was around 20 and proud of myself for reading one of those New Wave science fiction novels I had been reading about in fanzines. It wasn’t much fun to read. It was overly intellectual – well beyond my level of comprehension. After reading thousands of other books over the last fifty-plus years, Camp Concentration made much more sense. I actually enjoyed the story. I enjoyed it a lot. But please, don’t buy a copy without carefully reading this review.
It’s important to know that Camp Concentration first appeared in the July, August, September, and October 1967 issues of New Worlds. It suggests it was written in 1966 or early 1967 and published first in England, in a magazine that promoted the New Wave. To fully appreciate this novel, you must remember when it was written and what happened in the United States in 1966 and 1967. The first hardback came out in England in 1968, and it wasn’t until 1969 when it was published in America. I didn’t read it until after the 1971 Avon paperback, cover shown above.
I’d love to hear an audiobook version of Camp Concentration. However, a highly skilled narrator would be needed to handle all the accents, poetry, foreign language quotes, and characterizations. It would also make a wonderful movie. Unfortunately, the audience for either the audiobook or film would be small.
Back in the 1970s Camp Concentration was greatly admired. Philip K. Dick loved the book so much he promoted to friends and suggested it be made into a movie to a producer interested in his own work. But there’s a bizarre story here. Dick, who was paranoid, started seeing things in Camp Concentration and wrote a letter to the FBI claiming it had secret intel. You can read that letter here. Eventually, Disch found out about this and didn’t take it kindly. Wikipedia describes what happened:
I mention this early in the review because it helps set up how strange Camp Concentration is as a novel. It’s quite readable, but it has so many references to literature, music, philosophy, poetry, etc., that you might feel it has some deeper message. Even though I just finished the novel, I’m already looking forward to rereading it again. However, before I can do that, I need to study first. At minimum I should read Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus, and Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus. In fact, I need to go through Camp Concentration, make a list of all the works Disch mentions, and at least read their Wikipedia pages about them.
Louis Sacchetti is a conscientious objector, and Camp Concentration is the journal he writes while imprisoned in two locations. Disch wrote the novel while LBJ was president, and before Nixon. The story is set somewhat in the future, and Robert McNamara is President. McNamara was the Secretary of Defense under JFK and LBJ. McNamara played a major role in promoting the Vietnam War. To get the fullness of Camp Concentration, you need to read the Wikipedia link to McNamara. It also helps to see The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara, a 2003 Academy Award winning documentary.
Camp Concentration is a deeply cynical view of the United States in 1967. Louis is a war resister, at first imprisoned in an ordinary prison. He accepts that. But the novel is about when he is transferred to another prison, a military prison, where an experimental drug is used on the inmates by the U.S. Army. Most of the prisoners had committed crimes while in the Army, but Louis is a special civilian prisoner. The army believes it has synthesized a drug that will enhance intelligence. It was derived from a strain of syphilis.
The U.S. Army conducted experiments with LSD from 1955 to 1967. From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. government studied the effects of syphilis on black people after telling them they were being treated. These are just two examples of unethical experiments by our government. It’s not hard to believe the setup for Camp Concentration.
Camp Concentration reminds some readers of Flowers for Algernon because it’s about a treatment that makes people smarter. Over one hundred journal entries, we see Louis and the other prisoners change and become brilliant. I felt the characters did change, but my friend Mike, who got me to reread the novel, says he didn’t. Writers find it hard to describe humans with superintelligence. I’ve written about that recently. I thought Disch pulled it off, Mike didn’t.
Most of the novel is intellectual discussions about art, literature, poetry, theater, music, religion, philosophy, Alchemy, and other medieval beliefs. Mike thought all this discussion was boring, I was fascinated. I feel it helps to have a classical education to appreciate Camp Concentration. I don’t, but I’ve read enough to wish I had.
While reading Camp Concentration I was reminded of another book I read in the 1970s, Where the Wasteland Ends: Politics and Transcendence in Post Industrial Societyby Theodore Roszak. I’m not saying the two books are about the same things, but as the characters evolve intellectually, they start sounding like Roszak.
Read Disch’s Wikipedia entry, you’ll see that Thomas M. Disch and Louis Sacchetti have much in common. Louis is a poet, and Disch wrote The Castle of Indolence: On Poetry, Poets, and Poetastes.
In the novel, the drug makes the test subject smarter, but it also kills them within months. As the characters grow more brilliant, they realize they have much more to live for and become bitter. Disch appears to equate higher IQ with depression and cynicism.
Disch does not suggest that superintelligence leads to super-powers. The test subjects only become more academic in their communication with each other. As they evolve mentally, their use of intellectual ideas to express themselves becomes more dense. This is subtle, and it may be hard to believe they are more intelligent. It seems that most of their references are to ideas covered in Classical studies or Medieval studies.
If you are prone to depression, I would not read this novel. If you are among the faithful, I would not read this novel. If you prefer tightly plotted stories, that are easy to read, and enjoy action, don’t buy this book.
On the other hand, if you’re into the history of science fiction, the New Wave, or the 1960s, Camp Concentration might be a good one to read. Science fiction changed in 1967-1968. I believe several young prodigies like Disch and Delany took the genre in new directions, and older writers like Silverberg, Brunner, and Ellison decided they were tired of where science fiction was going too.
In Ted Chiang’s impressive overview of human superintelligence in science fiction, he mentions that John W. Campbell Jr. rejected a story by Vernor Vinge about a character with human superintelligence because no one can write such a story. (Vinge had proposed a sequel to “Bookworm, Run!“) The implication: since none of us know what being superintelligent is like subjectively, we can’t describe it. That’s silly. Campbell had been publishing a magazine describing space travel decades before NASA, or atomic bombs before 1945, or robots long before Roombas.
British journalist Ed Yong describes the umwelt of many species in his book An Immense World. How each organism views reality from its collection of sense organs is called umwelt. We might not be able to imagine being a dog, but we can analyze a dog’s senses and speculate what they can perceive.
Shouldn’t we assume science fiction can speculate on a human being with superintelligence by what it’s capable of perceiving and what it does with those perceptions? I’m guessing John W. Campbell assumed that a dog couldn’t imagine what it’s like to be a human. But is that really true? A dog might not comprehend humans reading a book, but I’m sure they understand much about us in their own special way. In fact, they might observe qualities about us that we’re unaware of.
Astounding Science Fiction in the 1950s was full of stories about ESP and other psychic abilities. Campbell called such abilities psionics. Throughout the history of science fiction, writers have speculated that superhumans would have god-like powers. I’ve written about science fiction and human superintelligence before and described many of the most famous of these stories. See: “Science Fiction and Human Evolution” and “The Origins of Higher Intelligence in Science Fiction.” The genre has a long history of attempting what Campbell supposedly told Vinge he couldn’t.
Strangely, hard science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke wrote two classic novels about superhumans: Childhood’s End and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Clarke gave no scientific explanation of how people might transform into next-stage humans. Clarke’s new humans were almost impossible to imagine. They are god-like to us. This is fun but gives us little to speculate about realistically.
Greg Bear imagines a new strain of virus affecting pregnant women causing a mutation in Darwin’s Radio. Children born of these women are more intelligent, have greater disease resistance, and can communicate non-verbally. This isn’t hard to imagine. Current humans show a tremendously wide spectrum of intelligence and physical health. And some humans are far better at communicating than others, especially via body language and empathy.
Nancy Kress imagines genetic engineering creating a new species of humanity in Beggars in Spain. Their key feature was needing less sleep. This gave them more time to learn, work, and compete. It’s easy to imagine this adaptation and how these new humans would do better than ordinary humans.
The movie Gattaca imagined a future society where normal humans competed with humans with carefully selected genes. The improved humans had the same human frailties, but out-competed normal humans for the better jobs. They were better-looking, smarter, more athletic, and had greater discipline. That’s not hard to imagine.
In Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes, Charlie Gordon undergoes an operation that advances his IQ. At the beginning, Clarlie works as a janitor and is cognitively challenged. The operation allows him to learn new things, and eventually become a super-genius. His new attributes are not beyond belief. Charlie learns new languages, achieves great academic success, and becomes tremendously productive. Charlie doesn’t develop ESP or godlike powers, but achieves the maximum levels of current human skills and traits. This is believable and easy to imagine.
Homo sapiens are only slightly improved over Neanderthals, but those improvements let us do so much more. For us to describe Homo superior we only need to imagine slight enhancements to our species and speculate about what impact they would have.
Some humans have tetrachromacy, which means they can detect four primary colors rather than three. Other people have eidetic memory. Stephen Wiltshire, an autistic savant, can draw detailed images of cities from memory after just a helicopter ride. All the traits that Human 2.0 might have are already showing up in us now. Conversely, all the traits that won’t emerge are those we lack precursors for now.
That’s why I think it’s silly to imagine humans evolving to have telepathy or be able to teleport at will. Those are comic book ideas. Campbell was both too hopeful and too naive about human evolution. He expected “The Man Who Evolved” by Edmond Hamilton. At best, I think we’ll get Gattaca.
One problem with evolving our current abilities is that we often see cognitive issues associated with people with extreme examples of those abilities. Can a perfect memory be imperfect? Can we be too smart? I’ve known many people far ahead of me in many skills. I can’t fathom general and special relativity. Does that mean Albert Einstein was a 2.0 human?
Until recently, I thought the human race was evolving slowly on average. But current events make me think we’re regressing. Some people already have superintelligence compared to others. It could be the evolution of our species won’t be by quantum leaps, but slow adaptation of biological trial and error. Much of science fiction is just fun bullshit speculation. We need to distinguish between fantasy and scientific possibilities.
Personally, I feel our role in evolution was to evolve machine intelligence. I don’t believe humans will ever become giant brains with tiny bodies, nonphysical beings, or something like Q from Star Trek: The Next Generation. It’s interesting that Greg Bear and Nancy Kress in their novels, had normal humans wanting to wipe out the new humans before they got established.
Lester del Rey summed us up nicely in “For I Am a Jealous People!” Our creator and descendants need to watch out.
I don’t see why Campbell rejected Vernor Vinge’s idea of writing a sequel to “Bookworm, Run!” Campbell had already published Slan by A. E. van Vogt and many other stories featuring human superintelligence.
From 1945 to 1975, P. Schuyler Miller reviewed science fiction books for Astounding Science Fiction and Analog Science Fiction. He died in October of 1974. I stumbled upon an online PDF collection of those reviews from 1945-1967. You can download that file here. (Warning – it’s 235MB.)
Unfortunately, the individual reviews aren’t dated and the run is far from complete. However, the PDF is searchable, and you can use ISFDB.org to date an individual review. Just look up the book title, then scroll down to the Reviews section, and find the one for Miller. Someday I’d like to create a file of all of Miller’s reviews from 1945-1975.
I put this PDF on my iPad and read it like a book. It’s wonderful. The reviews start before science fiction was regularly published in book form. Whoever collected these reviews evidently picked those they thought interesting to modern readers. Collectively, they have a history of science fiction published before 1968. For example, the early reviews cover books published before science fiction was a genre. Then we started seeing books from Gnome and Fantasy Press, essentially fan publishers. After that, we slowly see big name New York publishers take chances on the genre along with the rise of mass market paperback publishers.
We get to read the original reviews of books now remembered as genre classics and books that have since been forgotten. Often I read reviews of forgotten books that sound interesting enough to track down.
The first two reviews are books by Vardis Fisher: Darkness and the Deep and The Golden Rooms (April 1945). These books imagine life when Neanderthals and Cro-Magnon coexisted. Popular writers like H. G. Wells, Jack London, and Stephen Vincent Benet, also wrote on this theme. It wasn’t considered science fiction then, but our genre has claimed that theme since.
Here’s that first review:
Most book reviews in science fiction magazines are short blurbs. Miller writes comprehensive essays. As the years progress, Miller’s reviews become more elaborate, longer, often beginning with some science fiction history. The next review is of The Time Stream by John Taine (March 1947). Miller does more than describe and react to the novel, giving the background of how that story fits in the genre, and biographical information on the author. He compares Taine’s work to A. Merritt’s, and points out how Taine’s work originally appeared in hardback, while Merritt’s stories were serialized in magazines first. I’ve not read Taine or Merritt, but I’ve often read about both in histories of science fiction. This review makes me want to try The Time Stream. These reviews also give me information about collecting original editions. (Amazon has a Kindle edition of The Time Stream for $2.99.) Here’s Miller’s review.
I decided to jump to June 1954 and read the review for The Lights in the Sky are Stars by Fredric Brown, the science fiction novel I’m currently reading. By now Miller’s columns are longer. He reviews more books each month, so each review is shorter. That’s because far more SF books are being published every month. Since October 1951, they come under the title “The Reference Library.” (That’s where I steal the image above for this post.) Miller often begins his columns with a digression exploring topics related to current publishing.
I thought I’d test Miller on something hard. This is his review for Stranger in a Strange Land by Robert A. Heinlein from the January 1962 issue of Analog. I’m including his essay in the introduction as a sample of how he composed his columns.
That should give you enough examples to decide on downloading the entire collection of Miller’s reviews. If you’re reading on a computer with a large monitor, I have a page I’m working on that links to Miller’s reviews in issues of Astounding and Analog at Archive.org. You can read each column one at a time on screen.
P. Schuyler Miller also wrote some science fiction. I own this first edition of The Titan with a beautiful Hannes Bok cover.
Classics of Science Fiction 